baking

As a registered nurse, Katie Farrell has spent years teaching patients about health—and she's dedicated her website Dashing Dish to showing readers healthier alternatives to food they love and crave. Farrell's new book, Dashing Dish: 100 Simple & Delicious Recipes for Clean Eating, just hit stores—and, in it, she gives us three good reasons you shouldn't count calories. Plus, here's a great recipe for a delicious (and simple!) banana bread for one that you can make—wait for it—in the microwave. Should I Count Calories? Excerpted from Dashing Dish I have received many questions on the blog about counting calories, so I thought I would share my perspective on what has worked well in my own life. In general, I believe that counting calories can be beneficial for someone who is just starting to read nutrition labels and become familiar with different foods. However, I always suggest that our ultimate goal should be to listen to our bodies rather than counting calories. In the beginning stages of a weight-loss journey, counting calories can be helpful. It can provide a realistic sense of how to space out calories throughout the day, as well as help learn proper portion sizes. But when it read more

Halloween is one of my absolute favorite holidays. It is so much fun as a parent to share that joy with Brooks. It only gets better with each passing year. Plus, I look at Halloween as the official start of the candy and cookie season. Who can resist candy corn? I know I can’t. I feed my family as healthy as possible, but everyone needs a treat now and then! The big Halloween treat at my house is baking and decorating cupcakes. It has become an annual family tradition, and Brooks has so much fun doing it. It is as easy as baking and frosting, then let your pint-size “decorator” do the rest. To make healthier cupcakes: 1. I like angel food cake as the base because it contains less fat and sugar than regular cake. 2. If you are using a store-bought mix, you can substitute applesauce or plain yogurt for the oil to keep the calorie count and fat down. I usually replace no more than half of the amount of oil listed on the recipe to keep the texture and flavor. 3. You can also swap out whole eggs with egg whites (2 egg whites = 1 read more

My kitchen drawers are badly organized and I have a four-year-old who likes to swipe real kitchen utensils for his pretend kitchen, so I never have the right measuring utensil when a recipe calls for 1/4 cup of this or a 2 tablespoons of that. Which is why I'll be ordering up this kitchen helper, stat: S.B. Lattin How Many Guide from Zazzle. If you can't tell what it is, it's a chart that tells you how many of this you need to make however many of that. Like, if you can't find your 1/3 cup, you can use 5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon. Or if your tablespoon is covered in molasses and you now need to measure a tablespoon of something else, you can use three teaspoons instead. So genius! Could you use a How Many Guide in your kitchen? Or do you have several sets of highly organized measuring utensils? read more

Like many 20-somethings, New Yorker Dani Beckerman loved dessert and baked in her spare time. But she did something most of us haven't done: She turned her hobby into a full-fledged business, Jars by Dani. "I have been cooking and baking forever. All throughout high school and college, I was the go-to girl if you were craving anything sweet," Beckerman told us. "I have always loved mixing different textures and flavors in my desserts—it allows for the best taste, and layering things in jars made this more aesthetically pleasing." She tells us how she did it, along with five tips for turning any passion into a small business: Look for the lightbulb moment: "I was walking around an art store and saw the jars, and I decided to make desserts in them for a dinner I was having for some friends. I put some pictures up on Instagram, and people starting inquiring if they could order!" Use the power of social media: "The amount of interest and excitement that was generated by the pictures I put up on all my social media networks showed me that I had a very marketable product, so I went with it," Beckerman says. Be read more